Where Good Ideas Come From

The Natural History of Innovation

Go to the Reef, Thou Dullard, and Consider Its Ways

I looked forward to this;
Johnson's Emergence
is still one of two books that I point people to explain what I do, or used to
do
(the other
one being my former boss Melanie
Mitchell), and I think he's one of our best — most astute and
wide-ranging — popular writers about science and social science, which
means he
almost has my dream-job of being a science critic. And I mostly got
what I expected. This is 100-proof American evolutionist, naturalistic
liberalism, which is to
say, Pragmatism. It is a
celebration of the virtues of openness, experimentation (including failed
experiments), giving "slow hunches" chances to develop, to serendipitously
blending ideas from diverse intellectual
backgrounds and disciplines, and the continuity of human culture and
thought with processes in the natural world. It's a view of the social life of
the mind, illustrated by engagingly-told anecdotes from the history of science
and technology; apt references to a wide range of scholarly studies; long,
admiring quotations from Darwin; the natural history of coral reefs and the
evolution of sexual reproduction. (The broader history of culture, especially
the fine arts, is occasionally alluded to, and there
are abundantly merited plugs for his old
teacher Franco Moretti's studies on the evolution of genres and "distant
reading"; but mostly it's a science-and-technology book.) Johnson has painted
a crowd scene: good ideas hardly ever come from isolated individuals thinking
very hard and having flashes of inspiration; they come from people who are
immersed in communities of inquiry, and especially from those who bridge
multiple communities. The picture is an attractive one, which I actually think
(or perhaps "fervently pray") has a lot of truth to it. But I feel like being
contrary, while I do not feel energetic enough to arrange my objections,
reservations and extensions as a coherent argument, rather than a series of
numbered points.

While "good ideas" are there in the title, and the phrase is repeated
often, Johnson never comes to grips with what makes some ideas
good; at most he gets at complex, successful and influential.
(This is common problem with Pragmatism.) The formation of fascist ideology,
before it seized power, is a story of loose, open networks of thinkers bringing
together a very diverse set of eminently-respectable traditions into new and
unexpected configurations, nurturing long hunches, meeting in coffee-houses,
etc., etc. The kind of social processes which gave us fascism were not that
different from the ones which
earlier gave us democratic ideology, but one set of ideas was very good and
the other very bad, though exquisitely adapted to its setting. At an immensely
lower level of wrongness and harm, psychoanalysis has
proved scientifically and therapeutically
fruitless, but fits Johnson's ideas so well that he alludes to it several
times. Perhaps one could say that by focusing on science and technology, where
there are much clearer (though still not entirely clear!) criteria for "good",
Johnson largely evades this.

You can't have interdisciplinary breakthroughs without first developing
disciplines, and that to a very high level; but Johnson systematically neglects
how innovation happens other than through cross-fertilization. (The imaginary
Johnson in my head retorts that opening up a single discipline would reveal a
cluster of sub-disciplines, and so forth, and it's cross-fertilization all the
way down. Perhaps.) We've had this discussion
before, many
times: a lot of very narrow, technical, incremental work has to go in to
creating the sophisticated, precise, accurate, powerful ideas that can be
productively recombined. I find such work less congenial than the
recombination, but if the interdisciplinary ideas are any good, pursuing them
will lead to a new discipline, if things go well.

Johnson writes as though he doesn't
appreciate the trade-offs between
different kinds of errors, and the reasons why their costs might
vary with circumstances. (I am pretty sure I he has written about the
trade-off elsewhere.) This matters, because the trade-off forms the core of a
case for stubborn conservatism and refusal to speculate. (What follows is
Burke re-done in the language of "sophists, economists and calculators" —
that is, of the Neyman-Pearson lemma.)

As Johnson says here several times, most ideas are just foolish.
Accordingly, we have a lot of opportunities to mistake them for good ones
("false positives"); and of course we could think what's actually a good idea
is a bad one ("false negatives"). Reducing the false negative rate, by
cultivating more unlikely-seeming hunches, pursuing far-reaching connections,
etc., is, beyond a point, only going to happen by increasing the false positive
rate.

One of Johnson's examples is contrasting the speed, flexibility and
experimentation of Web software development with the sheer stodginess of the
FBI, and in particular how it failed to bring together two lines of
intelligence that, in hindsight, pointed to the 9/11 plot. Now, that was
— and I realize this is putting it very coolly — certainly a
false-negative error. But Johnson gives me little reason to believe that there
was any way of getting the organization to act on those hunches without also
acting on many other hunches which were, even in retrospect, just no good. How
many speculative
memos like"the
Phoenix Memo" were written in the FBI in the summer of 2001, which proved
to be dead ends? How much work would pursuing each one have called for?

As a society, we have decided, at least when we're at our civics-class best,
that false positives on the part of the police are so very bad that we will
tolerate quite a lot of errors the other way to avoid them. This is, to
review, because (1) we want to be safe from the police, and those who run the
police, (2) we dislike unleashing the snooping, harassing, arresting power of
the state on innocents, and (3) while the police are chasing phantoms, they are
not dealing with actual criminals. In contrast, the worst that happens when a
silly Web startup is funded is that a few million dollars get frittered away in
the Bay Area and/or lower Manhattan, and as someone who likes geeks in both
places I can't see even that as a total loss. (Remember, Johnson was the one
who brought up the comparison, not me.) It is a good thing, then, that the Web
is much more tolerant of false positives than is the FBI. (The latter's
antiquated IT system is another matter.) I am not asserting that the FBI is up
against its error frontier, and could only reduce false negatives by making
more positive errors — how would I know? — but I am pretty sure
that if it acted on speculation as readily as the Web development community, it
would be a danger to the republic and would need to be shut down.

This point, about trade-offs between different kinds of errors, is arguably
related to the previous one about disciplines.* The false-positive/false-negative dilemma is going to face any
institution which needs to come up with ideas and judge them, and it might help
us to understand and reform those institutions by thinking about this
consciously. The disciplines aim at increasingly precise, accurate and
elaborate understandings of fairly circumscribed domains. With goals like
that, false positives need to be suppressed; "single vision, and Newton's
sleep" is the way to see deeply. Of course even the most focused
discipline has a frontier where it is figuring out new things, and so it is not
clear in which direction one should go. There, among those mapping the
frontier, the discussion needs much more tolerance for false positives than
does teaching, or sharing work with other disciplines, or actions which up-end
people's lives. Parts of the apparatus of scholarly communication can be
rationalized as applying successive filters with more and more tolerance for
false negatives, but it's hard to believe that this couldn't be much improved
upon, or that the counterparts in any other domain are any closer to optimal.
The rational kernel of what Johnson is saying is, perhaps, that many
organizations would do well to cultivate some mechanism for
encouraging ideas, even with a lot of false positives, and then filtering then
once they've had a chance to grow.

In the final chapter he straightforwardly admits that no matter how many
wonderful anecdotes he piles up of collaborative, openly-shared innovation, an
opponent could come up with many other anecdotes of secretive, isolated
innovators driven purely by the prospect of reaping monopoly rents (i.e.,
returns on intellectual property). Something more systematic and synoptic is
needed, he correctly says, and proceeds to give it, inspired by Moretti's
"distant reading" of the genres of English novels. He pulls together a list of
several hundred major scientific and technological innovations since about 1400
(it's in an appendix), and classifies them all as either market-driven or not,
and either the products of individuals (including single firms) or networks.
He observes that remarkably few of them fall in the market-driven, individual
box, and remarkably many — increasingly many — in the
non-market, networked box.

Here's where I really show the depths of my ingratitude: Johnson is
completely right to do this, and it puts him far ahead of almost any other
comparable writer, but I am still not satisfied. Where did he get candidate
innovations for his list from? How did he decide whether something was major
enough to belong? How did he individuate innovations? (Saying that E
= mc2 and the special theory of relativity are two
separate innovations seems odd to the physicist in me.) For that matter, there
is another way of looking, systematically, at the kind of question Johnson
wants to answer here, which is statistical inquiry, in this case econometrics.
It's been known since the 1990s, at least, that it's hard to show any positive
influence of strengthening, or creating, intellectual property rights on
innovation. For that matter, just in the last month two papers have crossed my
virtual desk, showing that there is if anything a negative
relationship, at least
for genomic
medicine and
software
(both via Kevin Bryan's A Fine
Theorem blog
[1, 2]).
It would be deadly, in a popular work like this, to go over the analyses, but I
don't think it's unreasonable to expect Johnson to have gone looking for this
sort of social science, and to relate its findings to his readers.

The last chapter also, naturally, raises the question of what public
policy towards innovation should be like, and in particular whether innovation
is best encouraged by the coercive power of the state creating and enforcing
monopolistic market inefficiencies, i.e., intellectual property rights. About
this, Johnson is rightly skeptical, and I have to give him a lot of credit for
both raising the issue and for taking the stand he does, since it cannot
possibly help his sales prospects. But he does not go very far into this, and
he spends a lot of time and rhetorical effort reassuring the reader
that he is not a commie. (He repeats the myth that Marx offered to
dedicate Capital to Darwin, a legend that should have
died more than thirty years
ago.) But I don't think he does an adequate job of explaining why
someone who buys his arguments should not, in fact, be at least a bit of a
commie (especially a bit of a Kropotkinite anarcho-communist**), and the broader
discussion of what we should do with his ideas is a bit superficial.
To be fair, it's a huge area, I doubt anyone has really good conclusions yet,
and no matter what one writes it is unlikely to win friends, so perhaps saying
"just think about it, OK?" is the most that could be expected. — I wrote
this paragraph before seeing
Henry Farrell's related post, so you should probably go read that.

As may have become evident, Johnson's boosterism of the Web (and even of
specific companies) grows tiresome to me. I say that as someone who's been
enthusiastic about the Web since
1994, and whose life and career would have been very different (and
probably worse) without it.

Some of my carping above is probably just from my own reading having
obviously overlapped too much with Johnson's, so that I am close enough to see
flaws and infelicities, but not to appreciate how it would look to someone
coming to it for the first time. This is not as good a book as I was hoping
for, but it's still a good one, and with any luck it will noticeably raise the
level of public discussion.

*: I owe the thought which follows to a conversation at
SciFoo 2010 with Jen Dodd
and Michael Nielsen, and possibly
(there were some beers involved) Eric
Drexler. Credit for any insight goes to them, blame for folly is all mine.

Kropotkin ... points out how much has been achieved already by the method of
free agreement. He does not wish to abolish government in the sense of
collective decisions: what he does wish to abolish is the system by which a
decision is enforced upon those who oppose it. The whole system of
representative government and majority rule is to him a bad thing. He points
to such instances as the agreements among the different railway systems of the
Continent for the running of through expresses and for co-operation generally.
He points out that in such cases the different companies or authorities
concerned each appoint a delegate, and that the delegates suggest a basis of
agreement, which has to be subsequently ratified by each of the bodies
appointing them. The assembly of delegates has no coercive power whatever, and
a majority can do nothing against a recalcitrant minority. Yet this has not
prevented the conclusion of very elaborate systems of agreements. By such
methods, so Anarchists contend, the useful functions of government can
be carried out without any coercion. They maintain that the usefulness of
agreement is so patent as to make co-operation certain if once the predatory
motives associated with the present system of private property were removed.